


Gleaning

by englishable



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Avengers: Endgame (Movie) Spoilers, F/M, Not Actually Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-08
Updated: 2019-05-08
Packaged: 2020-02-28 06:22:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18750802
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/englishable/pseuds/englishable
Summary: In the end, the king of New Asgard stays behind, and so this is where Sif finally catches up to him. There is a great deal of effort that goes into building a whole life over again, both for yourself and your people, but the two of them are equally inexperienced in this respect and neither of them has an advantage over the other: although, to her credit, Sif did once fail a course in horticulture at the Asgard Academy.That might be good for something.





	Gleaning

…

Thor takes all his lessons from the palace’s private tutors, who instruct him in the barbarities of history and the romances of poetry and the arachnid, impartial intricacies of mathematics. He declares his teachers a bunch of droning bores who are not worth a pinch of dried owl shit, collectively, and decides on a whim to run through the Asgard Academy’s entire selection of elective courses in no particular order.

Sif suspects that he will tire of this diversion soon enough, if only because it means sitting in the upper study-rooms for two hours more than he has to every week, but Thor persists. 

She is not certain how much he really learns: he tells her things, of course, except he says it all with such gallant, swaggering bravado that she can never decide whether it is the truth or a pack of stupendous lies.  

Do you know, he begins, there are over eighteen hundred thunderstorms moving through the Midgardian atmosphere at any given time and only one storm on the planet they call  _Iuppiter Stella_ , but that one storm spans ten thousand miles across. Slugs have four noses, shrimps carry their hearts in their heads and a butterfly tastes with its feet, so think about that next time you want to let one land on you. There are cultures that consider alligator dung a contraceptive – maybe if you roll in it, Sif suggests – and others that regard sea cucumbers as an aphrodisiac. Infants are born without kneecaps. The head of a snake can still bite you, hours after you have cut it off, which Thor can’t imagine anyone would ever want to do because then the snake would be dead. On one of the branch worlds there is a race of talking trees whose language consists of only three words.

“Which ones?” Sif asks. “Can you say them in different orders, or is it all the same?”

“We haven’t learned the last word yet,” Thor scratches his cheeks, where the pale beginnings of a man’s beard are starting to bristle, “but the first two are  _‘I am.’_  I suppose those are all you’d really need, if it came the time to choose – the rest depends on moods or the inflections and the like.”

This is also about the time when the bottom sinks out of Thor’s voice, like a dipper plunged in water, and prevents him from singing the countertenor portions of the war-ballads he enjoys. The veins grow more prominent in his hands and arms. He is walking across the training yard to Sif, one day, and she realizes that he is a full half-foot taller than she is. Sometimes looking at him makes the little hairs on her neck prickle.

Sif, for her part, is rearranging as well – she likes to think that mystical, ancient secrets are awakening within her, even if the process mostly just makes her face pimply – but Thor does not notice. His dealings with her are conducted in the same spirit of impatient, jocular companionship he uses towards even the grown veteran warriors like Fandral and Volstagg and Hogun the Grim.

Or, mostly the same. He stores up most of the irreverence for her, if only because Loki is more liable to stab him. 

“And do you know,” Thor says, a delighted twist at the corner of his mouth, “that if there’s ever a female bilgesnipe out looking for a mate, she’ll get herself covered in mud and start making a sound like this –”

He puts his hands to his mouth and lets out a trumpeting bellow that causes people all over the palace to stick their heads from their windows. Sif deliberates as to whether she should hide her flushed face in mortification or punch him off the wall where they are sitting.

Everything comes so easy to him, Sif thinks. He makes his friends and wins his fights and tells his jokes and seems never to try very hard at anything he wants to do, although this may be partially because Thor will declare a thing stupid and useless if he cannot do it on the first attempt; Sif, meanwhile, has to try a thing perhaps a hundred times before she can say she really knows it, and very often she will fail on the hundred-and first-count as well. It takes her a whole year of training just to learn that there is a right way and a wrong way to fall, whether you are being knocked off your feet or knocked off your horse or knocked off your guard.

Finally she spends an afternoon running up and down the academy halls to discover that there is only one elective class the crown prince has not yet taken: horticulture, they say. Sif enrolls before asking what the word even means and spends an extra two hours after training each day in the palace’s vast glass greenhouse without washing the sweat from her hair or the dirt from her face.

Her plants will grow splendidly, Sif determines. They will burst forth in color under her fingers, in blooming life, the way they do for Queen Frigga who does everything with such wisdom and serenity. She will learn every name, every part, every use – juniper berries for a bleeding wound, elderblossom to sweat out a fever, comfrey for bone-setting – and then she will tell these uses to Thor. She will be teasing and sportive while she does it. Thor will try to match her accomplishments, and she will help him to come very close, but there will be some particular quality in her touch that he cannot replicate. Sif decides that this essential quality will be her womanhood itself, which is its own advantage when you look at it from the proper angle – she cannot count upon being stronger than an opponent and so must plan to be faster; she cannot count upon being bigger than an opponent and so must plan to be smarter – and is quite happy with her chosen course of action.

She proceeds, in this hazard of good intention, to subject nearly every plant placed under her guardianship to a slow, dispiriting demise. She waters them too much or too little; she puts them in the wrong places so that they get too much or too little light; she compliments a stunning yellow flower called an elecampane, purportedly used as an antiseptic, and within a week it has keeled over in its ceramic pot as if to spite her.

The only thing that prospers under Sif’s care is a long wooden box full of something that she at first suspects is plain grass but later learns is a hardy variety of winter wheat the gardeners are experimenting with. 

But this is agriculture, not horticulture, and they do not teach such things to children who are marked to be warriors.

“Well, that’s fine too,” Thor says. He plucks off a spike of the yellow grain and twirls it. “Father says the mortals organize their whole lives around planting fields of this – I’ll tell you what.” He sticks the wheat in his hair like a jaunty feather in a cap and smiles. “The first journey I take to Midgard by myself, I’ll find one of those fields and dump a whole rainstorm down on it for you. We can even let the mortals think it was your idea. What do you say to that, Lady Sif?”  

Sif loosens a clod of dirt to launch it at him. 

It lands squarely on his head in a dark shower of pebbles and roots, but when Thor shakes the last of it from his hair he is still smiling.

…

He says nothing to Sif for the whole time it takes them to walk beyond the streets of New Asgard and along a stone goat-path that cleaves its way up the cliff. He makes no comment as they wade through the high fields of purple heather, which are wet with morning dew and leave them soaked to the hips, nor when they pass beneath a stand of pines and emerge into a wide, rolling field ringed on all sides by the edges of a deeper mountain forest.  

Then Thor stops, standing with his feet apart and one thumb tucked between his belt and his ample stomach while his other hand pulls at the plait in his beard. His hair is washed clean today and is gathered at the nape of his neck by a length of twine.

“So,” he says, at last. “What do you make of it?”

Sif shades her eyes. A mist is rising off the field and it turns white-gold where the sunlight hits it. “Make of what, exactly?”

“I’ve been thinking – I don’t like having to ship in supplies every winter. One year that harbor will freeze over and we’ll have everybody on rations by the time the spring comes.” He stoops to collect a handful of soil. “I thought we might try wheat, maybe. Will that work?”

Sif looks at him. He stays hunched over, his big fingers turning the dirt.

She had found her roundabout way to New Asgard three months after the one they called the Man of Iron killed Thanos. Thor had been sitting in a cramped office above a bait-and-tackle shop that smelled of fish scales and cold blood, and when Sif walked into the room he had pushed back in his chair to look at her: then he had wadded up a piece of yellow paper off a legal pad, took aim and chucked it at her. 

Sif blinked in surprise as the paper bounced off her forehead, then blinked again when Thor let out a sigh that turned into a sob.

In the whole village there are perhaps two hundred and fifty survivors, none of whom Sif remembers by name, although there is woman with a tattooed wrist who answers to the address of Valkyrie. The rest, Sif is told, died during the fall of Asgard, or else died when Thanos came aboard their ship in search of the Tesseract. The grown people have hard lines on their faces, the seams cut down a rock by flowing water. All the children have hollowed cheeks, liquid eyes and a funny manner of looking just to the left of people when they are speaking, those of them who can be induced to speak at all.

Thor does not speak much to Sif, either. When he does it is sometimes in the same way as he used to, with the smiles and the easy manner of a man making ready to turn a practical joke; other times it is in long sentences that unravel from their centers like frayed rope unless he binds them off at the end with a laugh Sif does not believe. There is a distraction about him some days that puts piles of paper on the desk, which he purchased from an old sea captain, puts plates of food on the windowsill that he appears to eat without tasting or emptied bottles of drink in a waste-bin by the door, though the bottles grow fewer  in number as the weeks pass.  

Oh, it’s got nothing to do with you, Valkyrie tells her. You should’ve seen how he was before.

Then, ten days ago, after nearly six years kept by some unspoken but ubiquitous agreement, the village’s first child had been born.

Everyone had come to examine the recent arrival and bring him presents, rubber teething rings and floating bath toys shaped like ducks along with braided garlands of holly and sachets filled with the boiled bones of a frog. They had crowded into the family’s front dooryard to debate whether the little boy could rightly be considered an Asgardian or a Midgardian, first, and so to settle their argument the young mother had asked the king to bless him in the languages of both worlds just to be sure. Thor’s hand had all but covered the baby’s head when he laid it there.

And this morning, without ceremony or announcement, Thor had knocked at Sif’s door – they gave her a cabin by the docks, operating a radio to argue with passing cargo ships on the Norwegian Sea; change your course, change your course, you may be an ocean freighter but I am a lighthouse,  _hva poker driver du med?_  – and led her up to the field with its white-gold mist.

Sif crouches beside him.

“I’m not sure.” She pushes her fingers into the same soil to feel the silt and clay of its loam. Her hands and face have taken on a lean, bitter look, and she thinks that maybe some older bits of the universe got mixed into her body when the infinity stones put it back together. “Failing one class in horticulture hardly strikes me as the appropriate set of qualifications.”

“Well, you’ll never have to worry about the watering part. I’ll see to it that there’s as much rain as you need. Could –” he lets the soil slide through his hand “—we could try it, don’t you think?”

She looks at him again. He has foregone the false eye, today, which he claims gets dry and makes the inside of his skull itch, and he wears the patch in its place. At his temple there is a single, fine strand of silver-gray, shot through the wild blond, and Sif feels those same little hairs on her neck prickle. 

She breaks off a long stalk of grass to stick it behind his ear.

“Yes,” she says. “Of course.” 

…

**Author's Note:**

> I still don’t know how I feel about the decision to make Thor leave his people at the conclusion of Endgame, though I understand it opens him to more potential escapades than, say, board meetings about where to put the traffic lights, but I had hoped that finding out who he was could still be learned in the context of being the leader he was rather than the one he was trained, raised, or taught by example to be.
> 
> And Norse myths about Sif make her goddess of the grain and the harvest, which is not what we are given in the MCU but seems particularly fitting and harmonious for a woman who is married to a storm god.


End file.
